Wednesday, January 12, 2011

With the announcement of the iPhone on Verizon, I’m getting ready to switch carriers. I’ve had decent luck with a jailbroken iPhone on T-Mobile, but my coverage is spotty, I’ve been working with the two-gees on an Edge network, and I’m ready to pick something up that’s more modern and powerful.

I was hoping for an LTE iPhone on Verizon, but that didn’t happen. It might happen with the iPhone 5, but I’m not sure. My guess is Verizon is going to see how their new Android phones work on LTE and gauge capacity first. Then we might see one in the fall.

So my choices boil down to:

iPhone 4 on Verizon (3G)

4G Android on Verizon

4G Android on Spring

I suppose I should consider a Windows Phone 7 device, but honestly I don’t know that I’ll get the app support I want. To me the differences between iOS and Android are non-existant on the hardware. Sure one phone might be slightly more powerful, but not by a lot. The interfaces are similar, I can get a real keyboard on Android, but the rest is just noise. The marketplace is important, and music sync is something I want.

I looked around a bit and it seems that music sync is something that could work with Android, and I have a few choices there. So really it’s a question of the various apps I use working on Android. It seems that many of them are either on Android, or there are similar ones. So I could make it work on Android, and I wouldn’t necessarily need to re-invest a lot to move to Android.

Ultimately I’m not sure that I want to move away from iOS if I don’t gain much. I am definitely leaning towards an iPhone 4, and living with the slower 3G speed. Heck, it will be an upgrade for me in cities, and out near the ranch it won’t matter. No 4G is coming here anytime soon. Half the time we can’t get 3G.

I saw an interesting article about the iPhone on Verizon and how it’s not their best smartphone. I question if that’s true, since the raw hardware specs don’t mean everything. I have a few weeks to think about it and research a bit, so that’s what I’ll do.